Braun: Freehold man publishes book on worst dam collapse in world history

Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerManalapan High School graduate and former Star-Ledger Scholar Utpal Sandesara on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania where he is enrolled in a dual MD/PhD program. Utpal used the scholarship for four years at Harvard before going on to the University of Pennsylvania.

PHILADELPHIA — He is a born story-teller, grandson of two poets. A medical student also about to receive a doctorate in anthropology. And, now, at 24, Utpal Sandesara of Freehold has written his first book, the only comprehensive description of the worst dam collapse in world history. It’s called "No One Had a Tongue to Speak," published by Prometheus.

"I wanted to learn what I could about the disaster, but I soon discovered there really wasn’t much there,’’ says Sandesara. "No books, few articles, nothing beyond some newspaper articles that generally repeated what earlier articles had repeated.’’

So, he had to do it himself. He and Tom Wooten, his co-author, a Harvard roommate and friend whose father just happened to be a dam engineer. While Sandesara is completing medical school and PhD studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wooten is working on his own book, applying the lessons they learned in their first to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.

Sandesara knew about the dam collapse in the Indian state of Gujarat. He also knew his mother, now a school social worker in Bloomfield, lived near the Machhu River dam that, on the night of August 11, 1979, collapsed and sent a 20-foot wave of water into surrounding towns. What he did not know was how close his mother came to becoming one of the thousands of victims—estimates range from 2,500 to 20,000—of the disaster.

"We were watching television coverage of the tsunami in December, 2004, and she became very emotional," says Sandesara, who attended Harvard through a four-year scholarship provided by now-defunct The Star-Ledger Scholars program. "She began to cry, and it was obvious she wasn’t simply reacting to the tragedy on the television screen. She had lived through it and nearly died years before I was born.’’

When he returned to Harvard from winter break, Sandesara talked about the disaster, now nearly forgotten even in India, with his roommate, an aspiring teacher and writer. They decided to try to get support for researching a book on the collapse. Harvard provided research money and they received encouragement from some of the university’s top names, including Paul Farmer, the medical school professor internationally known for his work in Haiti.

Farmer, who had Sandesara in class, wrote in the foreword the book "needs to become required reading." It not only describes a human tragedy, he says, but it also confronts the efforts of a developing country to jumpstart industrialization and modernization with technology that can fail, as the dam did in India. He calls the book "suspenseful, elegiac, and haunting.’’

Although the book is about a 30-year-old disaster in a place far from here, "No One Had a Tongue to Speak" becomes a kind of reflection on other events—9/11, for example, or Katrina, or even the Japanese tsunami. It speaks to the intersection of natural and man-made disasters, the role of governments and politicians in responding to catastrophes, and even the lore that grows up around events that are too big to fail to create conspiracy theories.

"Many people who remember the disaster are convinced they know what happened,’’ says Sandesara, "but what they think they know does not comport with the facts as we know them.’’ Sounds like the "truther" movement surrounding 9/11.

The book is layered with suspense, beginning with a description of the collapse itself after a monsoon rain. Then come the rescue efforts, the official inquiries, a possible government cover-up of design flaws, and a court case that reached India’s Supreme Court.

Sandesara says he and Wooten are convinced the dam, rushed to completion by a government badly in need of "water wealth," failed to take into account the kinds of pressure that would be caused by a heavy monsoon season. Ironically, local politicians successfully quashed an official government investigation of the disaster — via a panel not unlike the 9/11 Commission — because the controversy delayed construction of a new dam.

The book is both political and personal, laced with vignettes about the people living and dying near the dam. There’s the story, for example, of a convicted murderer who saved many of his fellow inmates before he was washed away by the flood waters.

A story, too, of the children planning to go to a theater in downtown Morbi after playing outside. But they couldn’t get into their house to dress for the trip because a cobra had mysteriously found its way inside. By the time the cobra was removed, it was too late for the theater so the family stayed home.

The theater was destroyed by the flood and the people in it drowned. The children were safe because they stayed home. Among them, Nautama Shukla, Utpal Sandesara’s mother.